Ian Moir, the ambitious chief executive of South African retailer Woolworths, visited half of all of David Jones stores before deciding to press the button on the $2.l5 billion takeover of the department store group.

It’s rare that a chief executive would do that level of due diligence personally but Moir, 55, wasn’t leaving anything to chance on the biggest deal in Woolworths’ history.

He had Woolworths staff and a team of trusted external retailers, who he had previously worked with, go through all David Jones’s 38 stores, looking at the design, the brands and the staff.

“We wanted to be certain of what we were getting into," says Moir.

Such attention to detail says a lot about Moir, a Scotsman, and his successful career in retail that has led him to running Woolworths, which is often described as a South African Marks & Spencer.

By combining David Jones and Woolworths, however, Moir will create more than another Marks & Spencer, it will be a retail powerhouse.

It will be the second-largest department store group in the southern hemisphere after Chile’s Lojas Americanas, as measured by revenue.

“But not for long," says an energetic and confident Moir, who has his eye on being number one.

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Lojas Americanas has revenues of $US5.8 billion compared with $US5.3 billion of a combined Woolworths and David Jones.

Putting aside his keen due diligence of David Jones, Moir was already very familiar with the Australian market, where he has worked for a big part of his retail career.

An accountant by training, with an MBA from the University of London, Moir grew up in Dunfermline, a small Soottish town that lies a half hour drive from Edinburgh.

He was the son of train driver who had a humble upbringing, attending a state school, and playing rugby.

Moir’s retail career started in textiles and from there he took a role as operations director of Australia’s Woolmark, where he worked for a decade.

It was there that he met Bill Lowenthal, who was chairman of retailer Country Road. Through that connection Moir eventually joined Country Road as chief operating officer in 1998, months after South Africa’s Woolworths bought it.

A minority stake is still held in Country Road by billionaire retailer Solomon Lew, who has been at odds with Woolworths.

‘Very capable’

Graeme Seabrook, a former board member of Country Road and South Africa’s Woolworths, describes Moir as “very capable". “He’s very good tactically and at marketing."

Seabrook, who’s also a former joint managing director of Coles Myer, says Country Road was a good training ground for Moir.

Country Road was almost bankrupt after Moir came on board following a disastrous expansion into the United States.

Seabrook says Moir was involved in the decision to pull out of the United States and rebuild the Australian business.

He eventually became Country Road’s chief executive and ran it for a decade. He remains its chairman.

As well as rising as an executive at Country Road, Moir built a life for himself in Melbourne with his British wife. He has four daughters, the youngest of which is completing university.

Moir, who’s apparently a dab hand at gourmet cooking and enjoys a good red wine, is also an Australia citizen.

His task fixing Country Road involved a focus on its brand; streamlining its supply chain; cutting costs that were too high and finding out how the retailer had lost touch with its customers.

By turning around Country Road, Moir caught the eye of Woolworths’ board, who tapped him in 2010 for the top job.

It was a risk for Woolworths because the leap from running Country Road to Woolworths was enormous, as even Moir admits. “It was scary."

At Woolworths Moir implemented a similar strategy to that at Country Road, to turn around the retailer by unlocking the full potential of its brand and set it on a new growth path.

“He’s done extremely well over there," says Seabrook. “He took on a big task at Woolworths."

The company’s profits and share price have grown at an average of 27 per cent and 37 per cent annually over the past three years.

These figures soon made Woolworths a favourite of fund managers and analysts, who pegged it as a well-run, slick business.

Moir made many improvements at Woolworths including making its food offerings more appealing to middle-class South Africans, not just high-end consumers.

He also built the group’s private apparel offering and improved the speed-to-market of clothing to be competitive with fast fashion retailers such as Zahra.

In 2012, Woolworths bought Australian retailer Witchery for $172 million. This meant its Australian operations now accounted for about one fifth of Woolworths’ pre-tax profit.

The Witchery buy was small fry compared with the deal that lay ahead. And if the David Jones takeover succeeds it will mean Australia accounts for nearly half of Woolworths’ pretax profit.

An important niche

After turning around Woolworths, Moir would focus on the next stage of growth.

Woolworths needed scale and soon Moir and the board identified an important niche. There were no big retail players in the southern hemisphere, even though northern hemisphere retail giants such as H&M, Topshop, Zara and Gap, had begun to move into the region.

It soon became Moir’s mission to build a southern hemisphere retail powerhouse.

After looking from Brazil to Australia, David Jones kept coming up as the best fit for his plans.

With the grand dame of Australian department stores, Woolworths could become that big retail player and capitalise on economies of scale.

Bob Savage, a former chairman of David Jones, who stood down 16-months ago, says: “I can see why a retailer that has global aspirations would look at Australia as a good market."

Moir flew to Australia six weeks ago and started formal due diligence.

He engaged with the David Jones board, under chairman Gordon Cairns. In the past week, he met with Cairns as the two Scotsman finally struck an agreement on what an acceptable offer would be that David Jones would recommend to its shareholders.

Cairns says Woolworths is paying a “substantial premium" and that the formidable record of the South African retailer under Moir also made it compelling.

Moir also met with David Jones chief executive
Paul Zahra
, who he knew from when Zahra was head of cosmetics at David Jones. Moir then issued a statement outlining his vision to David Jones shareholders.

“We believe that David Jones is a truly iconic Australian retail business. Woolworths is a very similar business, closely aligned in terms of our target markets and our values.

“The combination will create a leading southern hemisphere retailer with meaningful scale, able to leverage common fashion seasonality with enhanced sourcing capability.

“We will work with the David Jones team to deliver the sound strategies they have already set in place.

“Woolworths will bring extra capability, financial strength and significant scale to accelerate these strategies and offer a greatly enhanced value proposition, delivering on-trend product within the most exciting and innovative shopping experience in the market."